Work has been slow. Like Molasses racing a slug uphill backwards in a snowstorm with Superman reversing the rotation of the earth slow. I started applying for jobs again yesterday and today. I ran out of options today, or possibly my brain was just too fried, so I started going through links I’m finding for freelance writing.

Freelancing is a tough business. I have to find the jobs, and they’re all on spec. You write the piece, they accept, you get paid. They don’t accept (more the norm), you don’t get paid. It’s a shell game. What doesn’t get accepted I can use to build a library and submit again somewhere else. Maybe have to edit to suit, but in the meantime, still no paychecks.

Some places you can query an idea before you actually write a piece. Part of the query, in my experience, is showing a small part of the work, so you do have to write some of it.

The internet has made the competition even harder because submitting anything and everything, in most cases, is just a click away. Anybody can do it, and that gives editors a ton more submissions to read.

One of the links I came across, and subsequently bookmarked as well, was for Cricket Magazine. It’s a children’s periodical with several different divisions and age groups. I decided to try a short story for their 6-9 year old group. That’s kind of a hard group because the six-year old’s may still be watching Barney while the nine-year old’s may have graduated to The Walking Dead.

It could be from 300-1000 words, I came in at just over 900. I can’t preview any of it here, just in case. It could take up to three months for them to get back to me. If they like it and want to publish, it could take up to another nine months, because that’s how far ahead they work. So, a year from submission to publication is a very real time frame for a thousand word children’s short story.

At least with the book, I have millions of potential customers who can be reached easier, in theory at least, they come to me, i.e. Amazon. With the freelancing I have to approach, and win over, one customer at a time.

So, today I took several hours to write a short story that I may never be paid for.

I really need to rethink how I make life decisions. Perhaps, in the box without ice cream really is better.